Actress
Actress
Born: April 14, 1936; Died: August 12, 2014.
Arlene Martel, who has died aged 78, appeared in dozens of films and television series in the 1960s and 1970s, but commands an exalted position among Star Trek devotees, having played T'Pring, Spock's intended bride in one of the best-known episodes of the original series in 1967.
The episode, entitled Amok Time, also features the Vulcan elder T'Pau, who is meant to conduct the ceremony and who gave her name to an English pop group in the 1980s, and a ritual fight to the death between Spock and Captain Kirk.
Arlene Martel was previously Arline Greta Sachs or Sax, born into an Austrian-Jewish immigrant family in New York in 1936. She spent her early years in the Bronx and attended New York's School of Performing Arts (later immortalised in the 1980 film Fame and the spin-off TV series).
While a student there she got to know James Dean, who had been on TV, but was not yet the iconic movie star he became in the mid-1950s. She told Dean's biographer Joe Hyams that he was her first lover and they would spend their time reading poetry and walking in Central Park.
She made her Broadway debut at the age of 20, in the comedy Uncle Willie, and then moved to Los Angeles to pursue a career in films and TV. By the early 1960s she was appearing regularly in hit series such as The Twilight Zone (1959 and 1961), The Untouchables (1960, 1961), The Outer Limits (1964) and The Fugitive (1966), by which time she had changed her name to Arlene Martel.
Playing a highly logical Vulcan on Star Trek presented her with new challenges. "Our director Joe Pevney, contrary to what most directors usually request of the actor, said 'Give me less, give me less'… Playing a character as emotionally controlled as T'Pring was certainly a first for me."
In the episode Spock returns to his home planet Vulcan where he and T'Pring have been betrothed since childhood. But it turns out she has formed a bond with someone else (the word "love" might be pushing it) and exercises her right to choose a challenger to fight a duel against Spock, choosing Kirk for the task. It all works out logically in the end, sort of. Martel has been described as "the sexiest Vulcan ever".
Although she never really made that leap to lead roles or major movies, she continued to turn up regularly in guest roles in some of the most successful television series of the time, including Mission: Impossible (1970), Bewitched (1971), as the witch Malvina the Terrible, and Battlestar Galactica (1978), playing Adulteress 58 in one episode. By this point she had changed her billing again, to Tasha Martel. She was married and divorced three times and is survived by three children.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereComments are closed on this article